The Newtown massacre

A year on

A YEAR after the shooting massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, America has learned a lot about itself. Just before Christmas last year 20 young children and six staff were murdered in their schoolrooms by a disturbed young man, using guns bought by his mother in an attempt to bond with her son. In the aftermath of that horror, it seemed likely that Congress would—at a minimum—tighten the rules imposing background checks on gun buyers, screening for those with criminal records or histories of severe mental illness.

Barack Obama and others talked of actual gun-control measures. Perhaps there might be curbs on the most powerful weapons and largest ammunition clips. They were urged on by mourning parents from Newtown—plain, undemonstrative New England folk, their good manners intact but their eyes somehow blank with grief. They toured the corridors of Washington power, trying to channel their pain into constructive policy.

Others, wiser about the realities of electoral politics and the clout of such gun lobbies as the National Rifle Association (NRA), murmured that stricter gun control would be a stretch. Too many Republicans needed A grades from the NRA to secure them from primary challenges back home. Enough Democrats from rural, conservative districts feared the attack ads that would haunt them if they voted for weapons curbs, accusing them of being gun grabbers for Obama.

Yet some optimism was possible, early on. After all, increasing the number of background checks would not be gun control. It would merely involve enforcing existing law more thoroughly. Surely Congress could manage that pitifully modest legacy for Newtown’s dead children. Some polls showed Americans supporting universal background checks by margins of more than 80%.

Then came failure. The Democratic-controlled Senate could not muster the 60 votes needed to close gun-sale loopholes, and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives did not even try. How did this happen?

In part this year has shown, once more, the power of a determined, passionate minority to overcome the half-hearted, unfocused wishes of a majority. It showed the fear that members of Congress feel when their office phone lines and email accounts fill with furious voter messages, carefully co-ordinated by the NRA (whose leaders were under pressure, in turn, from still more combative gun-rights groups).

But America already knew that the NRA was powerful and members of Congress easily frightened. This year offered some new clarity about the way American democracy works, too.

This is a political climate in which para-facts—nuggets of pseudo-truth, edited, wrenched from context, or simply invented from whole cloth—are wielded as weapons, used to shout down opponents, to comfort true believers in their prejudices and to blunt the force of actual, boring, factual facts. Here is just one representative example. In March, Lexington attended a rally by gun-rights activists outside the state capitol in Hartford, Connecticut. Activists waved NRA placards and signs reading “Stand and Fight” and “Feels like Nazi Germany”, less than an hour’s drive from Newtown. They cited strings of statistics to explain to your reporter, with passion and conviction, why the exceptional number of guns in America (some 300m) in no way helps to explain the country’s exceptionally high murder rate (four times higher than Britain’s and six times higher than Germany’s).

Several in Hartford cited the exact same talking point, claiming that home invasion rates soared in Australia after that country banned the most powerful forms of guns in 1996, following a mass shooting. They are wrong. Home break-in and robbery rates have fallen sharply in Australia since 1996, as have gun-death rates, with no corresponding rise in other forms of homicide. (The most recent Australian crime statistics may be found here.) No matter. The Australian “fact” is a staple of gun-rights rhetoric. Scan the comments on any news article about guns (perhaps even this one) and it will be cited.

The American gun debate is also one in which logic does not operate normally. After Newtown, the NRA’s main spokesman, Wayne LaPierre, and his allies in Congress were united in presenting the massacre as proof of a mental-health system in crisis. "We have no national database of these lunatics... We have a completely cracked mentally-ill system that's got these monsters walking the streets," Mr LaPierre told NBC days after the Newtown murders. The NRA backs the FBI-run instant background checks system used by gun dealers when selling firearms, Mr LaPierre soothed. The NRA supports putting all those adjudicated mentally incompetent into that system. That sounds conciliatory enough. Yet the same NRA opposed, ferociously and successfully, proposals to use those very same background checks more frequently.

The gun lobby, it was confirmed this year, argues its case in the same way that a fairy-tale wolf sports Grandma’s bonnet and nightgown. While America still felt winded by the tragedy of Newtown, the NRA was willing to give distraction and obfuscation a try. But when its patience ran out and its agenda was threatened, it ditched all pretence of co-operation, bared its fangs and attacked. Soon enough Mr LaPierre tired of talking about the mentally ill needing better care, and predicted in a speech to supporters on February 23rd that criminal records and the mentally incompetent would "never" be part of a background-check system, which was really aimed at "one thing—registering your guns". The “powerful elites” were not serious about prosecuting violent criminals or keeping dangerous people off the streets, Mr LaPierre went on. The elites had all the security they wanted, he said, before pivoting neatly from envy to fear. Regular folk needed the second-amendment right to bear arms, he thundered: “When the glass breaks in the middle of the night, we have the right to defend ourselves.”

America gained new insights about the working methods of the gun lobby. A fine piece by Robert Draper, due to be published on December 15th in the New York Times Magazine, catalogues the cowardice and cynicism required for Congress to ignore the bereaved mothers and fathers of Newtown. But it also observes that the NRA’s aggression is partly born of fear. As Mr Draper notes, surveys suggest that the percentage of American households possessing one or more guns declined by 36% between 1977 and 2012.

Cleverly, the gun lobby’s aggression is often most intense when dealing with political allies. A few weeks ago this reporter interviewed the outgoing mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, for a column. Mr Bloomberg, a vocal supporter of gun control, has funded political campaigns against candidates who have stood in the way of his goals. Some have been conservatives, but in an Illinois congressional primary, he funded leaflets and ads that helped to defeat a Democrat who had harmed the gun-control cause. Mr Bloomberg explained his tactics, and how they reflected his careful study of the NRA’s methods.

The NRA, he said, took an interesting approach with mostly-supportive politicians who had crossed them in some way, earning their enmity. Such politicians might typically protest: oh, but my opponent is even worse on guns. The NRA was typically unmoved, Mr Bloomberg noted. “The NRA say, we don’t care, we are going after you. That sends a message that the calculus you have to use now is the following. If you go against the NRA, they are going to be against you. If you don’t go against the NRA it is still possible that [other constituents] will vote for you, because they agree with your positions on [abortion] and gay rights and immigration and fiscal policy and so on.” That disciplined, remorseless pursuit of their goals gave single-issue advocacy groups “enormous” power, he concluded.

In a strongly Democratic corner of Illinois, Mr Bloomberg’s own variety of ruthlessness worked. But more recently his money and backing could not help two Democratic state senators in Colorado survive recall elections organised by gun-rights advocates, enraged at their role in passing firearms curbs in the wake of a cinema massacre in the state.

That points to another aspect of the gun debate that was exposed with great clarity this year. National opinion polls saying that most Americans want this or that to happen to gun laws are largely useless. Guns divide Americans deeply by region, locality and—to a striking and depressing degree—by race. Americans are divided in their opinions, because their incentives and experiences are very different.

The Washington Post has published some stunning analyses of the different roles played by guns in different communities. America’s overall gun-murder rates conceal vast disparities. Whites are disproportionately hostile to gun control, in part because they are rather unlikely to face a hostile, armed shooter. Gun murder is not a serious threat for most white Americans, and is vanishingly rare in such conservative, rural states as Wyoming. Overall a white person is five times as likely to commit suicide with a gun as to be shot with a gun, the Post found. In contrast, “for each African American who uses a gun to commit suicide, five are killed by other people with guns.” Unsurprisingly, most blacks support strict gun controls.

A final point of clarity is perhaps the most troubling. Attend gun rallies, watch speeches or interview politicians, and it could not be clearer that the single most potent message of the pro-gun lobby revolves around tyranny, and the idea that American patriots need to be armed to prevent the government from snuffing out their liberties. The second amendment’s right to bear arms, in this telling, underpins all other rights, and any move to qualify that right amounts to evidence of a liberticide government at work.

In the world of the second-amendment absolutists, this swiftly tips into narcissism: an explicit claim that gun owners, being men of clear sight and courage, will see tyranny descending when more sheep-like citizens remain blind (and that they, by personal force of arms, will defeat the jackbooted thugs of the federal government). That in turn feeds on deep-rooted traditions around secession and the rejection of top-down rule.

An elected Republican sheriff in Illinois recently told this reporter how he was sent text messages or emails almost “every day”, urging him to join other sheriffs in vowing to ignore federal gun-control laws. A wave of nullification bills were introduced in state legislatures after the Newtown murders, vowing to block federal gun laws (though the torrent has largely slowed, the Sunlight Foundation reported recently, as the prospects for federal law-making faded).

Perhaps no development is as striking as the rise and rise of the public-carry movement. New laws have been passed in several states granting new rights to citizens to wear their guns in such places as bars, churches and on university campuses. Activists in Texas and elsewhere have exercised their legal rights to stroll around supermarkets or queue in coffee shops while packing heat.

It is important to concede at this point that such laws and rights are the product of a democratic process. Outsiders may find it baffling, even horrible that the Newtown massacre did not lead to a wholesale rethinking of gun laws (though it did lead to the nation’s schoolchildren receiving lessons in how and where to hide, in the event of an armed intrusion). But the sheer weight of democratic inertia demands a certain deference: not only has nothing much changed, but Americans have largely moved on. Recent mass shootings—as in a naval facility in Washington, DC—suggest Americans are learning to live with gun massacres.

But there needs to be clarity as well as deference about what is really involved when one American passes another in a supermarket aisle, a rifle self-consciously dangling from his back. Such gun-owners are not only exercising their lawful rights. An armed man in the dairy aisle, surrounded by unarmed shoppers, is unilaterally awarding himself the power of life and death over all those around him. Implicitly, shoppers are supposed to understand that they are quite safe, because this is what Mr LaPierre would call “a good guy with a gun”, whose presence deters “bad guys with guns”. That is a large claim. The power that comes with carrying a gun is very great.

The past year has shown, with great clarity, that the gun debate is not an argument about law and order or public safety. It is a conflict about power, and power wielded unequally. Power being such seductive stuff, perhaps the only mystery, looking back, is that anyone thought that after Newtown very much would change at all.

If the 2nd amendment is about ensuring citizens' ability to resist tyranny, why would it apply just to guns? Small arms alone are not effective against a modern military bent on destroying liberty (ask the Syrians). For the 2nd amendment to fit the citizen defense fantasy, it also must be legal to own (at a minimum): surface-to-air missiles, rpg's, heavy machine guns, tanks, artillery, and armed drones. Only a good guy with a stinger missile can deter a bad guy with an F-22.

Last year when several of my European friends were convinced that finally the USA would have to wake up to reality in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings I predicted that no change whatsoever would occur. Americans, growing up on Disney, live predominantly in a fantasy world. The NRA thrives on fantasy and consequently dominates an important segment of US political life. The reality of their core argument - that an armed citizenry can withstand the tyranny of government - is as plausible as claiming that a child with a cardboard sword can defeat Islamic terrorists. But in the NRA fantasy world, governments don't have access to tanks, stand-off weapons, or any other modern means of deadly force. In the Disney world of the NRA we still live in the 1770s when a man with a musket could stand tall and defend freedom.
Not surprisingly these fantasists utterly failed to stand up when the Bush administration dissolved most of our constitutional freedoms and they remain supine in the face of the NSA's gross invasion of our privacy. So in reality the gun advocates are worse than utterly useless. But if you're an under-educated flabby white male with intimacy problems a gun is a great way to pretend to yourself that secretly you're Squint Eastward.

"Would anyone like to actually try to make that case?"
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Lexington already did, with his reference to tighter gun laws in Australia after a gun massacre there, leading to a decrease in massacres (and homicides overall). He made references to lower homicide rates in the UK and Germany as well.

On the other hand, gun advocates claiming that more people carrying guns would have prevented this and similar shootings never provide any data to back that up either. They, too, have a knee-jerk reaction, unsupported by facts, about what might have made a difference.

You should actually do some more research: The journal is a newspaper (not peer reviewed) by a libertarian student group, the authors are speakers for the Americana and Canadian gun advocacy groups and the data can't be found anywhere but their own paper. looking at national statistics gives very different figures that directly contradict the data and the conclusions in the opinion piece.

Once again, the Economist is very far off base. Gun sales in Newtown and Connecticut actually increased following the massacre, reflecting the will of the people and not the NRA. Furthermore, TE must be suffering from collective amnesia in forgetting that Connecticut already had an assault weapon ban in place at the time of the shooting. Finally, a study from the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy (hardly a bastion of right wing gun lovers) by Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser seems to disprove the myth that the availability of handguns increases murder rates. The Harvard study attempts to determine whether banning firearms would reduce murders and suicides. Researchers looked at crime data from several European countries and found that countries with higher gun ownership often had lower murder rates. Russia, for example, enforces very strict gun control on its people, but its murder rate remains quite high. In fact, the murder rate in Russia is four times higher than in the “gun-ridden” United States, cites the study. ”Homicide results suggest that where guns are scarce other weapons are substituted in killings.” In other words, the elimination of guns does not eliminate murder, and in the case of gun-controlled Russia, murder rates are quite high. The study revealed several European countries with significant gun ownership, like Norway, Finland, Germany and France – had remarkably low murder rates. Contrast that with Luxembourg, “where handguns are totally banned and ownership of any kind of gun is minimal, had a murder rate nine times higher than Germany in 2002.”
The study found no evidence to suggest that the availability of guns contributes to higher murder rates anywhere in the world. Further, the report cited, “the determinants of murder and suicide are basic social, economic, and cultural factors, not the prevalence of some form of deadly mechanism.” Meaning, it’s not guns that kill people. People kill people. And Obamacare; big government kills people.

Brilliant article that clearly explains how most of the world looks on at the US's insane gun laws with utter incredulity
And, as expected, fantastic reading the comments
- reasons to avoid travelling to the US parts one to one hundred

In reference to the comments below -
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This talk of taking on the US military with glocks and AR-15s is totally nuts (and called sedition, btw) -
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And highlights the danger of way too much exposure to video games and old guys at the VFW, and not nearly enough to rational thought.

Am I the only one on this comments page that thinks the argument used that “the government is going to come and try to take everyone’s guns away” is utterly ridiculous?
And somehow the constitution somehow supports this belief?
Those who believe so, sure read a whole lot into one run-on ambiguous sentence that is the 2nd amendment.
Get a grip! Who’s feeding you this stuff? What drugs are you inhalin’?

I don’t mean to be disrespectful of others views: we all have a right to our opinion
But I REALLY don't quite follow the alternate universe these folks are in, that justify the notion that we should all stock up on the "latest & greatest" weaponry so as to be able to fend off evil armies of our own constitutionally elected government.

Are you all preparing for some kind of “Rambo” fantasy existence when life as we know it comes to an end?

If so I believe that this nation’s mental health issues are much more widespread then we have all been lead to believe.

Let's be honest here, gun ownership does very little to prevent tyranny. The Syrian rebels own guns, and they also own anti-tank weapons, rocket propelled grenades, heavy machine guns, anti-aircraft installations, and possibly chemical weapons, and they're fighting the Syrian army to a standstill at best. And if you think the Syrian army would last 10 minutes in open combat with the US army, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
If we were serious about guaranteeing the ability of citizens to defend themselves against tyrannical government, we should not be talking about private ownership of assault rifles, but of private ownership of anti-aircraft missiles, tanks, and heavy machine guns.

What this article, and most others advocating stricter gun control, fail to even address, is whether the proposed restrictions would have actually helped prevent the Newtown massacre, or any other similar event. Would anyone like to actually try to make that case? The argument here seems to simply be that the event was so terrible that we should have had a knee-jerk reaction and passed some laws so that we could comfort ourselves that we did "something," without regard for whether that "something" would have actually made any difference.

"An armed man in the dairy aisle, surrounded by unarmed shoppers, is unilaterally awarding himself the power of life and death over all those around him...The past year has shown, with great clarity, that the gun debate is not an argument about law and order or public safety. It is a conflict about power, and power wielded unequally."

The question that we ought to ask ourselves as a society is this: "Are we willing to trust a random stranger with a gun?"

Would you be so kind as to set forth, in broad sketch, (i) your formal area/s of education, (ii) how you have spent your career, and (iii) what actual experience you have in running any form of business, non-profit, government entity or other organization?

I truly find your comments here to be extremely tiresome. The one above is not a violation of commenting policies of this site, but very many of your comments do constitute extreme violations of the rules of this site.

Your "no facts and no evidence" charges are also extremely tiresome, noting that this charge applies to a large percentage of your own posts here.

More to the point of the extant thread, you really do not seem to understand what my own post is saying, you just keep uttering negative, objecting, and lacking-in-content posts in reaction to my own and countless others' posts. Have you nothing else to do with your time?

For every gun owner who crows that their guns are essential to prevent government tyranny please explain how this plan would work? Have you studied military tactics? Do you have a strategy to defend even your local area? Anything? They have jets.

As a life long Democrat and 2 time Obama voter, who happens to be an NRA member who shoos high power rife competitively I like any human being was horrified by the shootings in Newtown. When I purchased any gun I submitted to a background check. I initially supported the expanded background check bill but I have to confess I was horrified by my Democratic politicians drunk with power who were demanding an assault weapon ban.

I read this "article" and found the bias in it amusing. One thing to consider is that People from the United States tend to be less collectivist/communitarian and more individualistic than people from other countries. My home state passed an assault weapon ban that thankfully "grandfathers" any weapon I own. I have no intention of surrendering something I legally own and have used responsibly because of the actions of a deranged individual in another state.

I began to lose sympathy for the Newtown parents when they became a club that President Obama used to beat me with to change my behavior. I think people who tend to have a more collectivist mind set might do things differently.

I will not support any politician (Democrat or otherwise) who attempts to implement gun control beyond expanded background checks

FYI, the Queen is chief of state these days, but not head of government. While there can be some confusion among Americans, since we combine the two functions, they are very different. The head of government is the one who enforces the laws written by the legislature.
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The chief of state merely provides a ceremonial focus; no law making powers involved. So no, the monarch did not disarm anybody. (But nice try.)

Tyranny already exists in America. Americans are being deeply exploited by the industries and professions which manipulate congress with money. The majority of Americans are being bled out of their incomes and savings by the organized tribes (professions and industries) which purchase legislation from America's Congress and state legislatures. A vast percentage of Americans today are debt slaves whose economic flesh is owned by banks and the government. While other industries and professions have blood lines inserted into Americans to tap as much as they can get -- all with the assistance of America's legislatures.

Tyranny is already running America. It is simply cloaked in "laws" purchased from the whores in America's Congress and state legislatures. It is so laughable that people who oppose tyranny don't even see this.

Americans should surely be permitted to keep their guns, but per my post below, no guns should be sold to anyone having severe mental illness, and no guns should be permitted to be located in a household where a person with severe mental illness resides. Simple solution.

As for the tyranny controlling the lives of Americans today, one wonders how that will ever be brought to an end.